Fool Senselessly Destroys Valuable Firearm

Here’s one way you can achieve your 15 minutes of fame — or rather, 15 seconds — by getting your face on TV. From Riverside, California:

One of Chad Vachter’s prized possessions was a thousand-dollar AR-15 assault rifle. After seeing the growing number of mass shootings in the country, Vachter said he was fed up and decided to take a hammer to his gun, destroying it.

The rifle appears to be a Smith & Wesson M&P Sport. If he paid much more than $700, he was robbed. But it is still a senseless waste.

Earlier this [month], police say a gunman killed several people during a shooting rampage in several different locations in northern California, including an elementary school. Vachter says the incident hit close to home, and he had enough.

He hasn’t gone completely insane…

Vachter says he wants to be clear that he still supports the second amendment and will be keeping his shotgun and pistol. But he’s challenging other gun owners to destroy their assault weapons.

By “assault weapons,” he evidently means semiautomatic rifles, which have been in standard use for generations for hunting and target shooting.

According to the Association for Safe International Road Travel,

• Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day.
• An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled.

In the U.S.A. alone,

• Over 37,000 people die in road crashes each year
• An additional 2.35 million are injured or disabled
• Over 1,600 children under 15 years of age die each year

Yet so far as I know, Vachter has not arranged to have the local news film him as he destroys his car.

On a tip from Lyle.